We're pleased to announce that painter Lizzy Langford will be staying at Pasture for a week from the 8th August. She'll be exploring the meadows and local flora, looking at making dyes and pigments for paintmaking. Her practice centres around using traditional methods of extracting pigments from earth and plant matter. Lizzy's paintings suggest another way of seeing and engaging with the natural world, in the action of painting, in movement and process, between the site of the pigment and the site of the studio.

Her personal motivations are to draw attention to the current global crisis, working with organic matter to discuss unrelenting growth in the name of “progress” and humanities consequential dissociation from nature.

We are delighted that Sarah Needham is going to be here from 20th February as our next artist in residence. Sarah, a painter from London, is concerned with human inter-connectedness, and the interplay between the personal and the universal as expressed though the material  of pigment. She makes her own pigments and has an interest in the way in which pigments leave material colour across human history and geography and traces of people's interactions. There is a sense in which these colours hold more than the formal record, they hold nuance and space for connection, for potential and extant symbolism and for the stories never told.

Anna is a freelance photographer and visual artist. Originally from Finland, she is now based in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, UK. Anna received a BA (Hons) in Photography from University of Wolverhampton in 1997. The central themes of Anna's practice are sustainability, the commons, material culture, women’s labour and endangered folk traditions. Her practice-based research has challenged her to look at the environmental footprint of her own creative work which has led to her investigating the role that plants and minerals can play in analogue photography as well as experimenting with historic recipes for inks, pigments and dyes, using natural materials. To achieve this she regularly forages and grows her own pigment garden, with the aim to embody a more sustainable and reciprocal practice.

Anna says 'During ​my stay at Braybrooks I am going to be researching the history of the common land of the water meadows and the ancient traditions attached to managing these. I am particularly interested in any historic records surrounding women’s roles here, if any, and how those records are kept and archived. I am keen to meet local folk and collect any oral histories attached to the working on the meadows and learn about the plants specific to the site. I will be experimenting with various alternative analogue photographic techniques and using plant matter and water found in the meadows in my processes. I will be looking at local soils and other natural plant and mineral colours that can be utilised during my residency. To work sustainably and in reciprocity with the land and the environment, it will be influencing the direction of my methods. However I am not expecting a specific outcome but to have the time and space to get inspired by a place that is completely new to me.'

Ruth, the first artist in residence, is a painter, performer, curator and Jungian analyst. She has a specialist interest both clinically and creatively in the dissociability of the psyche, and the potential for healing contained within its complementary trait, the associative tendency. Her live art has explored psychic connectivity between people both living and ancestral, telepathic connection with cultural artefacts, and related to sea creatures and the sea as conduits for the collective unconscious.

She says 'Recently I’ve been making paintings using stills of landscapes and figures from two early vampire films, one set between the world wars, and one in 1934. I like the synergy between them, the relationship across time. And the theme of a shadowy underworld, and crossing between two worlds, is also significant for me: how do we understand ourselves unless we incorporate awareness of what lies beneath what we think we know?'

Ruth is in residence over three weekends in May, and will give a talk about the work on Sunday 29th May 4-6 pm, so put the date in your calendar and keep an eye on this blog and our social media feeds for regular updates. 

Here is our short film made about Orford Ness Lighthouse that was sadly demolished this month. We made several visits to the lighthouse between 2012 and 2015, originally when it was still in use by Trinity House and later when it was owned by the Orford Lighthouse Trust.
Originally full of light from the prisms and navigation panes, it became darker as these were removed after it was decommissioned. At first I visited the lighthouse and made a series of paintings responding to the light. However I also had a series of photographs that I had made exploring the effects of the light and wanted to develop these further in a sequence in their own right. Stuart had been making work from the sound of objects including the nearby Languard Fort at Felixstowe, so it seemed a good idea to combine image and sound using the ambient sound and light found within the building between 2012 and 2015. The film was developed and screened at grove projects, Bury St Edmunds in 2015 as part of a week long artist residency there.